After some deliberation, I find that
my reaction to the latest addition to the Godzilla canon bears a striking
resemblance to my reaction to last year’s Man of Steel, also a divisive
reboot of a long-standing cultural icon.
Both are revivals of franchises that I have never been particularly
drawn to, nor have I had much exposure to them.
Both are films that I sincerely hoped would nudge me towards being a
fan, and give me a feeling for what keeps bringing so many people back to them. And while both films certainly have their
moments of power and awe, I walked away from each one feeling slightly
underwhelmed by the overall experience (although I definitely think Godzilla is by far the superior of the
two, in terms of overall quality).

We get an opening montage more or
less establishing for us that the governments of the world have known of
Godzilla’s existence for some time, and founded an international organization that has been monitoring him ever since the
events of the first Godzilla
film in 1954. Furthermore, this organization,
or more specifically, its lone on-screen representative Dr. Ishiro Serizawa
(followed around by a sinful waste of Sally Hawkins) is aware of other
creatures apparently from the same era as Godzilla. One of them is discovered to have hatched in
a cave in the Philippines, and soon afterwards, it turns up in a coastal
Japanese town most definitely not called Fukushima, where it destroys the
nuclear facility and effectively sets itself up in a cocoon there to feed off
the remaining nuclear energy in the core (the explanation we eventually get is
that these creatures are from a more radioactive era of earth’s history, and
therefore feed off nuclear reactions).

Obviously, this is covered up by the
world governments, much to the fury of nuclear scientist Joe Brody (played by
Bryan Cranston), who survived the attack but lost his wife in the process, shown
in the one genuinely great scene in the entire film featuring real, human
emotion. After the attack, we cut to 15
years later. Brody’s son is now a munitions
specialist for the US military, while Joe has made a hobby out of obsessively
studying phenomena like what he witnessed at the plant, trying to prove that it
was not, as the Japanese government claimed, an earthquake. More out of exasperation that anything else,
the son agrees to accompany him on one last trip to the quarantined facility to
try and find out the truth. There, they
discover that it was, in fact, a monster that destroyed the facility all those
years ago, and that the quarantine was merely put in place so that Ishiro and
his colleagues could study it.

Shortly after they arrive, the
creature, referred to by Ishiro as a MUTO, awakens, leaves the cocoon, and
begins to leave a trail of destruction and death in its wake as it heads across
the Pacific to San Francisco, where they realize it will meet up with another
MUTO that recently awoke in the Nevada desert.
Assuring the military that they have no possible way of killing these creatures,
Ishiro claims that there only hope is to lead Godzilla, accompanied by an
entire naval fleet, to San Francisco as well, so that he can so battle with the
great monsters from another age.

It’s a lot of exposition and
build-up for a very basic monster-movie premise, but the serious amount of time
needed to explain and show all this is not the reason that the film fell flat
for me on more than a few occasions. The
movie makes a big deal of out very slowly building up the atmosphere of human
terror of the awesome, supernatural might on display, waiting to fully show
Godzilla and the MUTOs in action until the very end, and as far as the
technical side goes, it handles itself very well. The movie looks great, there’s none of the
shaky-cam nonsense that ruined so much of Man of Steel (one big reason why it’s
a superior reboot, all else aside), and every time we get to see Godzilla, the
effects really are jaw-dropping. The
final battle taking place, for once, in a city not starting “New” and ending
with “-ork,” is of a much different sort than the quick pace of last year’sPacific Rim, with the monsters slower and more ponderous, but it’s still
engaging and a ton of fun to watch.

No, the real issues start to pop up
whenever the monsters are not screen, which, sadly, is most of the movie- the humans
are not well written, and with the exception of the always-dependable Cranston
and Watanabe, they are not well-acted or well-directed. Taylor-Johnson could not come across blander
if he had rice cakes stapled to his forehead, which is a major problem, because
his relationship to his Dad and his efforts to get to San Francisco before the
monsters do (his also-boring family is conveniently located right in the middle
of the city) is clearly meant to be the emotional center of the film. And….yeah, there’s no way around it, everything
involving him and his family just does not do it for me. I am yet to hear from anyone who thought that that aspect of the film worked. Which is a shame, because
if the film had focused more on the dad or Dr. Ishiro and on their issues, we
might have a genuinely great film on our hands.
Hell, I would have loved to see a movie devoted solely to Dr. Ishiro, who
seems to have a really fascinating backstory that never gets let out of the
box.

Ultimately, the real question to
answer is this; the flaws with how the human characters are handled aside, is
it worth the wait once we finally get to a good, old-fashioned monster
smackdown with a $160 million facelift?
I think it was for me. The
opening, centered around old man Brody, works great, and I loved the scope of
the third act. For myself, and for a lot
of other people apparently, that was enough.
For others, it wasn’t. To decide
whether or not it works for you, you’ll just have to see for yourself.